Facebook is a major player among the emerging social networking sites on the net. Online users register to have a Facebook account where they can “socialize” with a listing of friends with whom messages can be exchanged between and among them. You get to your group and your friends’ profiles and they get notified accordingly.
Origins
The name facebook takes off from the popular book name distributed by Harvard University administrators to incoming freshmen to help them get to know each other with information about them. Mark Zuckerberg founded the site with the help of college pals and fellow computer science students at the Harvard University.
Facebook was initially confined to Harvard students. It later became so popular that it expanded to include other Ivy League colleges in Boston. Its popularity went beyond Boston to include any college student and finally became open to all students from 13 years of age. Facebook now has more than 300 million active social networkers worldwide.
Features
Facebook is often compared with a similar social networking site MySpace. The latter offers more flexibility to have user sites customized using HTML and cascading style sheets or CSS. Facebook only allows plain text. But that didn’t prevent it from becoming one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet.
It has enough features to make the users content. There’s the Wall feature that provides enough space on user site where friends can post messages for anyone to see. It can now allow attachments to it whereas you only get to post text messages before. Status is a feature announcing to your online friends your whereabouts and happenings. Photos allow you to upload albums and pictures. This is the most popular feature on the Facebook site.
The site continues to evolve to make it as response as possible. Facebook, along with other social networking sites like Twitter also took on a more commercial appeal as company executives and politicians use it for business and political purposes.
